Social networking is the practice of expanding the number of one's business and/or social contacts by making connections through individuals, which in turn gives rise to social capital. It can be said that an individual with many more social links has correspondingly more social capital than one with fewer.
Social network exist independent of technology and they have been around ever since the advent of societies—people network face-to-face, in public places, via snail mail etc. However, Technology, particularly, e-mail, IM and the Web has made it easier and faster for people to maintain and nurture their immediate social networks. The rise of social networking sites like. Orkut, MySpace, Friendster, Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, MSN Spaces, Flickr, Live Journal, Yahoo 360, Ryzc, etc, points to a need in society for such technological aid.
However, despite rising popularity, these networks suffer from some drawbacks, the primary of those being bootstrapping of the network where one has to create an identity and then bring in most of the people you already interact with into the network, and also considerable time and energy has to be spent on the network and one has to actually periodically login and interact using the applications UI
The popularity of sharing blogs and music, making friends and dating over the Internet has driven social networking beyond the PC to the mobile phone. The unparalleled potential of mobile phones and carrier networks to promote such connections in enhanced ways is only now being fully recognized and exploited. What exists today are primarily Bluetooth-based short range applications that allow you to interact with ‘familiar strangers’ in the public space, web-based blogs and file sharing applications with a mobile component that allows members to send text messages to the service to essentially broadcast their location via text messaging to their friends, location-based instant messaging applications, interactive wi-fi applications that allow users to share their music locally through hand-held devices, etc.
The present invention provides a social networking application that brings together the best of breed social networking functionalities in an in-network environment.